Category 5 hurricanes may have slammed Florida repeatedly during the chilly Younger Dryas, 12,000 years ago. The cause? Hurricane-suppressing effects of cooler sea surface were out-weighed by side effects of slowed ocean ...

One of the most economically important fish is shrinking in body weight, length and overall physical size as ocean temperatures rise, according to new research by LSU Boyd Professor R. Eugene Turner published today. The average ...

The world's oceans are warming, and the marginal seas exhibit more notable warming than the open ocean due to their proximity to land and other unique regional factors. The Yellow Sea and East China Sea (YECS, Fig. 1) are ...

Jose continues to bring tropical storm conditions to southern New England although the storm has become post-tropical. NASA's Terra satellite caught a view of the storm sitting almost stationary about 100 miles from Nantucket ...

Former Hurricane Otis was not showing any thunderstorm development or precipitation on satellite imagery on Sept. 19. As a result, the National Hurricane Center declared Otis a remnant low pressure area.

Summer is coming to the Gulf of Maine, longer and warmer than ever—as much as two months longer. That's the message of a new research article by a team of scientists led by Andrew Thomas of the University of Maine School ...

Sea surface temperature

Sea surface temperature (SST) is the water temperature close to the surface.

In practical terms, the exact meaning of surface varies according to the measurement method used. A satellite infrared radiometer indirectly measures the temperature of a very thin layer of about 10 micrometres thick (referred to as the skin) of the ocean which leads to the phrase skin temperature (because infrared radiation is emitted from this layer). A microwave instrument measures subskin temperature at about 1 mm. A thermometer attached to a moored or drifting buoy in the ocean would measure the temperature at a specific depth, (e.g. at 1 meter below the sea surface) — this temperature during the day is called temperature of the warm layer. The measurements routinely made from ships are often from the engine water intakes and may be at various depths in the upper 20 m of the ocean. In fact, this temperature is often called sea surface temperature, or foundation temperature. Note that the depth of measurement in this case will vary with the cargo aboard the vessel.